Amazon Lightsail vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.8, while VMware is ranked #11 with an average rating of 7.5. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 2.0% mindshare in PSP, compared to VMware’s 9.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Amazon Lightsail

Read 12 Amazon Lightsail reviews

1,052 Views
1,052 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Read 15 Pivotal Cloud Foundry reviews

6,010 Views
5,950 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Amazon Lightsail

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Amazon Lightsail both compete in the cloud services category. Amazon Lightsail seems to have an edge with its cost-effective pricing, making it a preferable choice for smaller projects.

Features: Pivotal Cloud Foundry offers advanced scalability, robust deployment, and excellent monitoring, ideal for stable Java applications. It integrates seamlessly with CI/CD platforms and supports secure internal transactions. Meanwhile, Amazon Lightsail is known for its usability, fixed pricing, and easy setup with pre-configured instances, making it appealing for small to medium-sized projects.

Room for Improvement: Pivotal Cloud Foundry could simplify deployments, enhance integration with tools like Kubernetes, and improve documentation. It also requires more sophisticated features and easier migration options to public clouds. Amazon Lightsail needs to improve support and documentation, disk management, and auto-scaling, with greater flexibility in software updates and backward compatibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Pivotal Cloud Foundry is robust but complex in setup, requiring technical support, and is versatile across hybrid, private, and public clouds. Amazon Lightsail targets ease of use in public cloud environments, particularly for non-tech users, though it tends to rely heavily on community support resources.

Pricing and ROI: Pivotal Cloud Foundry has higher, variable pricing reflecting its comprehensive features, potentially offering substantial ROI for large-scale transformations. Amazon Lightsail provides predictable, affordable pricing ideal for small businesses and startups, favoring cost-effective and straightforward deployments.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Lightsail vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Lightsail vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry

July 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Lightsail

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

10th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

11th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon Lightsail is 2.0%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 9.8%, up from 8.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

Atul Chauhan

DevOps engineer at Tech Mahindra Limited

Auto-manage features optimize server management and reduce costs

In terms of features, Amazon Lightsail can auto-manage the server with capabilities such as Auto Scaling and Placement Groups. They can auto-manage, and the billing cost is reduced because they have limited technology, which helps to optimize our cost billing for AWS. The benefit of using Amazon Lightsail over the AWS console management is that it is a small platform that is easy to understand, as it has only the instance, DNS, Route 53, snapshots, backups, and load balancing network. Amazon Lightsail has five technologies, and because it's easy to use and everyone can understand it, anyone can manage the server or add anything to that server, making it easy to understand. The initial setup is easy to do.

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Stephen Hack

Web App developer at FDIC

Easy to use, simple to sign-in, but lacking graphical interface

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is used as a cloud platform Pivotal Cloud Foundry has helped our organization by the way we've set it up, it's easy to sign in, bind services, push services, and create YAML files. The most valuable features of Pivotal Cloud Foundry are its ease of use and the command line…

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The benefit of using Amazon Lightsail over the AWS console management is that it is a small platform that is easy to understand, as it has only the instance, DNS, Route 53, snapshots, backups, and load balancing network."

"Implementations are completed with a few clicks, allowing efficient transitions to other development stages, and setup is easy whether for online support or basic business requirements."

"EC2 instances are pre-configured and upgraded, so you can simply select and instantly pay for an EC2 instance to set up WordPress, Node.js, or a server container using Docker."

"The initial setup is pretty easy."

"I find Lightsail particularly valuable for hosting WordPress as it is easier to set up than a bare metal server, which requires extensive configuration and package installations."

"The most valuable features are the usability and customer service."

"Amazon Lightsail is a virtual instance that is a service of Amazon AWS, designed to store data securely and provide applications through the cloud at an affordable cost to the SME sector."

"Amazon Lightsail is easy to use and very cost-effective compared to other services such as Azure and Google."

More Amazon Lightsail pros

"The solution is stable and resilient. In our company, we do not even see any challenges with the solution."

"It supports CI/CD, and is integrated with the CI/CD very well."

"The most valuable features of Pivotal Cloud Foundry are its ease of use and the command line interface has the ability to push instances to the cloud easily."

"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is auto-healing and the plenty of other features that are provided."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to scale. The services that connect to the database are also very good."

"The most valuable features are the monitoring and the deployment is easier."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very robust, especially for building Java."

"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the UI, it is easy to use."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry pros

Cons

"When you need to add some custom rules to Amazon Lightsail, the auto scaling feature is a bit difficult."

"The disadvantage I see is data storage; if any data crash occurs in the cloud server, that will lead to significant losses for the customer."

"To improve, I feel the disk management is too basic. I can't easily partition the disk for the operating system. I have to follow the main configuration that is already set up in the template. To partition the disk, I would need to deploy the operating system first and then make changes, but it's not an ideal method. I would recommend improving the disk management."

"Amazon Lightsail needs more security in the networking because hackers can attack in application layers three and four."

"The solution could be smoother than it is."

"I don't see this solution as enterprise-ready, for bigger companies like banks."

"Based on my limited exploration of Amazon Lightsail so far, I would like to see improvements in the console, particularly in user behavior and some cost-related aspects."

"The main area for improvement in Lightsail is the difficulty in scaling down resources."

More Amazon Lightsail cons

"There are no synthetic application monitoring and real-time monitoring features."

"In the next release, I would like to see easy integration with external tools."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is not scalable, infinitely, because when you install it on a set of virtual machines it is very hard to scale. It's easy to scale on an application level, but not it is not similar to if you were using Amazon. Amazon you can scale thousands of applications."

"Something that can be done better is canary deployment. So, right now, we're using blue-green deployment. The support for canary deployment would be nice."

"The Pivotal Cloud Foundry's initial setup has a learning curve for my team, but it was easy to use."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve on the technology it is a bit complex."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve the documentation. They are good, but they could improve more. Additionally, it would be beneficial if there were more use case examples."

"In the next release, they should offer additional applications for the databases, and improve the deployment experience."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Lightsail is available at an affordable cost starting from five dollars per month."

"Amazon Lightsail is a bit cheaper than Amazon EC2."

"The services that it provides are good for the price."

"The affordability of starting at five dollars makes it an attractive option for startups and medium-sized companies, aligning with budget considerations while offering essential cloud services."

"The prices are better than EC2 machines, for instance, because they are simplified management, but it works well, and I am able to run everything that I need on it."

"A few months ago, Lightsail's pricing increased, likely due to the addition of the new VPC feature."

"It's very cheap."

"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."

"The pricing is on the higher side and there are cheaper options available."

"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."

"We do pay for the licensing cost because we have opted for a private cloud setup. So, it is a cloud setup, and we have to make payments based on the cloud size. I do not consider it very costly when comparing it to the market."

"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."

"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

11%

University

10%

Financial Services Firm

37%

Manufacturing Company

18%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Lightsail?

In Lightsail, they simplified to do it in as few clicks as possible. So, around ten clicks, I have a virtual machine deployed.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Lightsail?

Lightsail is available at an affordable cost starting from five dollars per month. This cost may increase with additional features like a static IP.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon Lightsail?

Amazon Lightsail needs more security in the networking because hackers can attack in application layers three and four. The networking layer is basically the hacker's target to break the network, s...

See all answers

Which would you recommend - Pivotal Cloud Foundry or OpenShift?

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a cloud-native application platform to simplify app delivery. It is efficient and effective. The best feature is how easy it is to handle external services such as database...

See all answers

What do you like most about Pivotal Cloud Foundry?

I find the ease of deployment and management of microservices to be the most valuable features. The platform also has good auto-scaling capabilities.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pivotal Cloud Foundry?

I would say it is around a nine out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive. Just short of Oracle. It's sort of Oracle cloud.

See all answers

Comparisons

Google Cloud vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 33% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 30% of the time

Heroku vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 8% of the time

AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 6% of the time

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Red Hat OpenShift vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 32% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 31% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 10% of the time

Google Cloud vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 8% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 4% of the time

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

PaaS Clouds

July 2025

Download Amazon Lightsail product report

Buyer's Guide

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

August 2025

Download Pivotal Cloud Foundry product report

Also Known As

No data available

PCF, Pivotal Application Service (PAS), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Pivotal Function Service (PFS)

Overview

Lightsail is ideal for simpler workloads, quick deployments, and getting started on AWS. It’s designed to help you start small, and then scale as you grow.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) is the leading enterprise PaaS, powered by Cloud Foundry. PCF provides a cloud-native application platform that allows you to continuously deliver any app to every major private and public cloud with a single platform. PCF is proven to accelerate feature delivery with higher developer productivity and a 200:1 developer to operator ratio. PCF's built-in security and self-healing capabilities reduce risk in your app portfolio while maintaining high-availability at scale to keep customer facing systems online even in the most challenging circumstances. pivotal.io

VMware

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

Humana, Citibank, Mercedes Benz, Liberty Mutual, The Home Depot, GE, West Corp, Merrill Corporation, CoreLogic, Orange, Dish Network, Comcast, Bloomberg, Internal Revenue Service, Ford Motor Company, Garmin, Volkswagen, Solera, Allstate, US Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, ScotiaBank

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Lightsail vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry

July 2025

Free Report: Amazon Lightsail vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry

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